selected passages from "THE ANCIENT SUNDIALS OF IRELAND", by M.Arnaldi, edited by B.S.S., London, 1999

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THE FIRST IRISH EVANGELISTS

This was the land and these were the people that the first Christian missionaries found when they visited Ireland. The conversion of Ireland took place very early, when it is considered that the Romans never landed on its shores. In AD 431, a large enough Christian community must have existed to convince Pope Celestino the First to send the Bishop Palladio to be the Leader of the Christian believers. However it is St. Patrick, who is the uncontested true evangelist of the pagan Celts of Ireland. It appears that he was the son of a Roman official, a certain Calpurnius, who probably lived in Wales. At sixteen years of age he was carried off by a band of raiders and sold as a slave to be a herdsman for an Irish chief. After many years of bondage, Patrick escaped and returned to his own country. It is believed he became a pupil of St German at Auxerre in France. After the premature death of Palladio, he was sent to Ireland and occupied the vacant post, so fulfilling a dream in which a voice continually called to him to return to that land. Patrick landed in AD 432 (the traditional date) on the shore of Strangford Lough, and immediately converted a petty local chief with the name of Dichu, who gave him a piece of land at Saul on which to build his first church. Soon he had journeyed to the hill at Tara, seat of the supreme monarch to induce King Laoghaire to accept the new God. He did not succeed but obtained (in spite of the opposition of the Druids), permission to convert anyone else who wished to embrace the new religion. Patrick adopted a different method, one would call astute, to propagate the new faith in Christ, by approaching and converting the great kings or principal pagans, often procuring the automatic conversion of whole clans. Many legends are interwoven with the life and miracles of Saint Patrick and intermingled with Celtic magic and spirit. What seems to me the most poetic, and that which expresses best the marriage between the pantheistic Celtic soul and the Christian spirit, is that of St. Patrick at Tara, surrounded by ten Celtic chiefs, intending to explain the supreme dogma of the divine Trinity, with a shamrock 5 between his fingers.